Film scanners

[Magellan]

Hi everybody and a happy new year to you all
I have a large collection of negs from the film days and need to scan them. Can anyone recommend a decent bit of kit for this purpose? Bearing in mind that as soon as I have scanned everything I will sell the scanner on; as I have no other use for it.
The type of things I’ve been looking are the Epson Perfection 4490 Photo Scanner (£150 new at amazon) and the Epson Perfection 4990 being sold second hand on ebay.
I need to scan 35mm and medium format, some of the scanners have film holders for 35mm only, or have film feeders for 35mm only; does this mean you can’t do medium format manually?
Also I’ve read the other posts on this subject and noted the probs with silver films! Most of my negs are FP4, HP5 with some panF thrown in for good measure. Am I going to have problems scanning this film?



Mike

 

[Steep]

Somebody recently bought an Epson to scan film, not heard anything back on how good it was though, I'm sure it did 35mm only.

I have a Genius HR8 which does a reasonable job of 35mm, 6x4.5 6x6 and up to 6x9 plus slides. If you look in the reviews forum you can see my review of it. One thing I've noticed is it tends to show up any problems with the negs such as soft focus which you don't notice when looking at them directly.

 

[Rhodese]

Hi,
I went through this phase some three or four years ago and bought a flatbed with film adaptor (Agfa Snapscan e 50) it was OK for my needs, but I finished up making a slide copier out of a shoe box putting the negs one end and the camera the other end and re photographing them in raw it was reasonably successful .I don’t convert them till I want to use one, it would take years. The best of luck with your quest.

PS. Do you really need them digital?

 

[chewyuk]

I have a Nikon Coolscan 5, It scan neg's really well, Have been thinking of selling it for more than 6months now, but haven't quite got around it it. It won't scan your MF, but the results at the highest DPI are amazing. I have scanned in all of my Ilford films OK, but again my experience is with a Nikon scanner...I think the Epson 4990 scanner got product of the year by Practical Photography a year or so ago, would go for a flatbed if you really need to scan in your MF.

 

[Ben]

I use an Epson 4990 and it's great! It comes with plastic film holders for 35mm, medium format (6x4.5, 6x6 and 6x7) and large format. Scanning quality is superb and also features ICE dust removal for colour film.

 

[Magellan]

I'm now wondering how many of my Negs are of any quality, we used to say you were lucky if you got 1 good picture per roll, Did I save just that strip or the whole roll? after ten years it's hard to recall. At present there is such a huge list of must have kit: 80-400 lens, monitor, more memory (pc not me, I'm beyond repair ) etc ect. The scanner has slipped down the priority list at the moment; lens and monitor are firmly at the front now.

 

[chuckles]

Silver based film images are only a problem with scanning if you're using ICE to clean the image up. Kodachrome slides suffer the same fate!

As for the Epson scanner - well worth it for the money! But your priorities have slipped so not as important to you.

Just posting here if somebody was following the thread and wanted an answer (of sorts).